This is in today's edition of Scotland On Sunday: my article about the Opera de Tours's production of the musical comedy L'amour masque by Andre Messager & Sascha Guitry. (This is the reason I've been getting interested in Guitry & co recently...). It's at the Edinburgh Festival from 1 to 3 September and I think it sounds fabulous - wish I could be there to hear it. You may need to register at the Scotsman website to get into the article, but it is quick, free and harmless. More info about the show from the EIF website here.
It is extraordinary, the way that one artistic passion can turn out to relate to many others in unsuspected ways. When I set out to write Faure's biography, I had no idea that he would turn out to have connections to one of my favourite writers, Turgenev; or that a ballet of Alain-Fournier's wonderful novel Le Grand Meulnes would have been made to his music (Andrée Howard's La fete etrange - being staged at the Royal Opera House in October); or that his friend Messager would have dedicated to Faure's memory the music he wrote to Guitry's play Deburau which may well have helped to inspire my favourite film Les Enfants du Paradis. Weird, eh? Or simply a symptom of attraction on my part to a particular aesthetic that is shared, in one way or another, between them all? As they say in Russian, 'Bog zniyet...'
Sunday, August 28, 2005
Friday, August 26, 2005
Stressbusters
This is the indomitable Norman Lebrecht's inspiring account of how he found himself performing the recitation in Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw' at Dartington last week.
Every music commentator should take part in a performance now and then and Norman's article helps to show why.
Speaking of stressful performances, we hear this morning that one of Leonidas Kavakos's strings broke during the Berg at the Prom last night and he finished the concerto on the leader's violin. It must take nerves of diamond, never mind steel, to switch fiddles in that piece, of all pieces, in the middle of the Royal Albert Hall, live on BBC Radio. What's more, Andrew Davis had dropped out and Joseph Swensen was drafted in to conduct instead, somewhat late in the day. Tom and I were down at Glyndebourne and missed the fun...
If I feel stressed out by proofreading my novel and trying to catch last-minute inconsistencies - of which there've been plenty - all I have to do is think 'I will never have to recite Schoenberg, or break a string in a Prom' and I feel better INSTANTLY.
Every music commentator should take part in a performance now and then and Norman's article helps to show why.
Speaking of stressful performances, we hear this morning that one of Leonidas Kavakos's strings broke during the Berg at the Prom last night and he finished the concerto on the leader's violin. It must take nerves of diamond, never mind steel, to switch fiddles in that piece, of all pieces, in the middle of the Royal Albert Hall, live on BBC Radio. What's more, Andrew Davis had dropped out and Joseph Swensen was drafted in to conduct instead, somewhat late in the day. Tom and I were down at Glyndebourne and missed the fun...
If I feel stressed out by proofreading my novel and trying to catch last-minute inconsistencies - of which there've been plenty - all I have to do is think 'I will never have to recite Schoenberg, or break a string in a Prom' and I feel better INSTANTLY.
Tuesday, August 23, 2005
Piano man or shaggy dog?
The mystery of the "piano man" has been solved. This is the report in The Guardian.
Turns out it was a bit of a shaggy dog story. He's from Bavaria and the whole thing appears to have been an elaborate hoax. As for the 'piano genius' element - it does seem that that was the result of mental health workers in the UK not being able to tell the difference between a full-fledged concert pianist and someone who can just about pick out a tune from Swan Lake. The report on the TV news last night was gently accompanied by a background account of Chopsticks.
Turns out it was a bit of a shaggy dog story. He's from Bavaria and the whole thing appears to have been an elaborate hoax. As for the 'piano genius' element - it does seem that that was the result of mental health workers in the UK not being able to tell the difference between a full-fledged concert pianist and someone who can just about pick out a tune from Swan Lake. The report on the TV news last night was gently accompanied by a background account of Chopsticks.
Sunday, August 21, 2005
What a feeling...
I become seriously proud of my husband on an occasion like this. There he was, standing on the stage at the Albert Hall, which was packed to the rafters with music lovers going absolutely nuts over Beethoven 9. Live on BBC TV. Up there with one of the world's great orchestras and Kurt Masur and a wonderful big choir and soloists. What an occasion. In Yiddish, we call my emotion last night 'clibing nachas' - roughly equivalent to basking in reflected glory from one's loved ones, but in truth untranslatable.
The Gubaidulina piece, 'The Light of the End', was stunning. Well worth a webcast listen this week if you didn't catch yesterday's concert in any other way. Full of astonishing imagination and possessed of a rich, instinctive spiritual progression that could only have been articulated through the medium of her own musical language. I'm looking forward to hearing it again in Lucerne during the LPO tour. I normally avoid travelling with the orchestra because of their stressful schedules, but can't resist the idea of two Swiss days in Lucerne! The fact that I don't really like Beethoven 9 is neither here nor there...
The Gubaidulina piece, 'The Light of the End', was stunning. Well worth a webcast listen this week if you didn't catch yesterday's concert in any other way. Full of astonishing imagination and possessed of a rich, instinctive spiritual progression that could only have been articulated through the medium of her own musical language. I'm looking forward to hearing it again in Lucerne during the LPO tour. I normally avoid travelling with the orchestra because of their stressful schedules, but can't resist the idea of two Swiss days in Lucerne! The fact that I don't really like Beethoven 9 is neither here nor there...
Saturday, August 20, 2005
Tonight's Prom...
...will be quite an event It features our very own Tomcat and his orchestra, under their principal conductor, the indomitable Kurt Masur! They will be starting with a piece by Gubaidulina and then doing Beethoven 9th. It's going out live on BBC2 - as well, of course, as Radio 3 and the good old webcast. The LPO Prom is always a slightly bigger deal for my resident fiddler than most other gigs, since it is always the first concert after Glyndebourne - having done nothing but opera for several months, one's suddenly out in the spotlight again. And the Albert Hall is very large. Tonight is a little compounded by the suspicion that he'll be in quite a lot of close shots on the TV, because for the Beethoven he's sitting on the second desk of the Firsts, next to the orchestra's glammest blonde Hungarian, who is bound to attract the cameras!
Tickets are a bit thin on the ground, or so I'm told, but the arena queue will be doing its stuff, as ever. Do come along if you can! Gubaidulina is doing a pre-concert talk at 6pm, which should be fascinating, and Tom assures me that the piece is marvellous and very listenable.
Tickets are a bit thin on the ground, or so I'm told, but the arena queue will be doing its stuff, as ever. Do come along if you can! Gubaidulina is doing a pre-concert talk at 6pm, which should be fascinating, and Tom assures me that the piece is marvellous and very listenable.
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